Masters of the database, extraordinary journalism

Martin Stabe points us to the Web site for the book Ghost Plane: The True Story of the CIA Torture Program, by Stephen Grey:

… aside from its intrinsic significance, the story is also probably the premier recent example of computer-assisted reporting in British journalism.

Grey uncovered the fleet of CIA-owned aircraft used for rendition by obtaining huge databases of flight logs from the FAA in America, data collected by plane spotters and provided by an aviation-industry source.

He then used Analyst’s Notebook, a sophisticated (and expensive) piece of software normally used by police and intelligence agencies, to cross-reference the thousands of individual flights with details gleaned from the anecdotes told by the handful of prisoners who had emerged …

This is the sort of skillset that journalists will increasingly need to do extraordianry investigative stories in a society where public records come by the gigabyte on DVDs rather than as a stack of photocopies leaked in a brown envelope.

Stabe is 100 percent correct — this skill set is desperately needed in journalism today. We make sure every journalism student in our school gets some hands-on training with Excel, but the resistance level is very high. I wonder what we should do to make it clear to the students how important these skills are.